ing to meet again, if they
killed nothing, at the same spot by sunset.

It was with a heavy heart and my belt drawn tighter that I left the
others, carrying a loaded rifle, which seemed to increase considerably in
weight. Now, even well north in British Columbia, especially if near the
Pacific, there are favored valleys sunk deep among the ranges and open to
the west which escape the harder frost, and as this was one of them I
determined to search the half-frozen muskegs for bear. The savage grizzly
lives high under the ragged peaks, the even fiercer cinnamon haunts the
thinly-covered slopes below, but I had no desire to encounter either of
them, for the flesh of the little vegetable-feeding black bear is by no
means unpalatable, especially to starving men.

So I prowled from swamp to swamp, seeing nothing but the sickly trunks
which grew up out of thinly frozen slime, while no sound made by either
bird or beast broke the impressive silence of the primeval solitude. At
last, when the day was nearly spent, I crawled toward a larger muskeg,
which spread out from a running creek, and knelt in congealed mire behind
a blighted spruce, listening intently, for a sound I recognized set my
heart beating. All around, dwindling in gradations as the soil grew
wetter, the firs gave place to willows, and there was mud and ice cake
under them. Peering hard into the deepening shadows, I saw what I had
expected--a patch of shaggy fur. This was one of the small black bears,
and the creature was grubbing like a hog among the decaying weed for the
roots of the wild cabbage, which flourishes in such places. Some of these
bears hibernate in winter, I believe, but by no means all, for the bush
settlers usually hunt them then for their fur. No summer peltry is worth
much.

I was only a fair shot with the rifle, and the strip of black, half seen
between the branches, would prove a difficult mark in an uncertain light,
while it was probable that three lives might answer for the bear's escape.
So I waited, aching in every joint, while my hands grew stiffer on the
rifle stock, but still the beast refrained from making a target of itself,
until, knowing that it would soon be too dark to shoot, I had to force the
crisis. A strange sound might lead the quarry to show himself an instant
before taking flight, and so I moistened my blue lips and whistled
shrilly. A plump rotund body rose from the weeds, sixty yards away, I
guessed, and I pitched up th